When my daughter Clementine came home from school the other day with red, raw hands I couldn’t help but ask her why she hadn’t worn any gloves to school that morning. Glaring at me briefly, she shot back, in a tone rife with accusation and reproach, “Because I don’t have any, that’s why”. Ah yes, how could I forget? In an effort to save enough money this year to make a down payment on the gas bill I had cut back my glove purchasing to the point where, parsimoniously, I had only bought ten pair.
This isn’t as extravagant as it sounds: I always buy the cheapest kind of gloves I can find, usually those stretchy ones that are marketed as “magic gloves”. (In the beginning, I thought that this moniker meant that the gloves would fit anybody; now I know that what it really means is that they will disappear like “magic”–an especially crappy kind of magic, if you ask me). By only getting the cheap ones, I am able to afford something like a dozen pair for each of my children (or, as was the case this year, ten); this makes it all the more frustrating that they haven’t had a pair between them since October.
This is especially hard for me to understand, because, I’m the type of person who once owned the same pair of gloves for over ten years; even then I didn’t lose them, but rather retired them when they eventually fell apart. I am also still in possession of the backpack I got my freshman year of college, as well as various other assorted pieces of “vintage” clothing. My kids hate hearing these stories of lovingly preserved t-shirts and hats, but I can’t help but tell them–especially when it comes time to leave for school and once again the only things they can find to put on their hands are a pair of rainbow-colored “toe socks” and an old hand puppet.
“You see this jacket?” I’ll say, pulling on my favorite piece of denim. “High school graduation present.” At this Clementine will roll her eyes and mutter under her breath about my complete lack of fashion sense and “nasty, old, worn out clothes”. She will rebuff my argument that the “distressed” look is back in, adding that what my jacket is exhibiting is not “distress”, but, in fact,“panic”. “No matter,” I’ll say, “At least I still have a jacket. And gloves.”
Sometimes I try to tell myself that there is a logical reason for their glove vendetta: maybe they have found some new translation of Nostradamus that revealed to them that, in the very near future, gloves would no longer be necessary. (Maybe a vague warning about global warming along the lines of :When mighty oaks/are replaced with shrubs/ it’s good-bye beach house/and so long, gloves).
Or maybe it’s simply a ploy to get rid of gloves that aren’t “cool” enough; I’m not that old that I don’t remember “losing” the Fonzie sweatshirt my mom got me in the fourth grade. The problem with this theory, however, is that the gloves I buy aren’t uncool, at least not when they’re worn in their proper pairs (I will admit there is a little something funny about wearing a “Hulk” glove on one hand and a “Princess” glove on the other).
Maybe it’s just my paranoia, but I think that the REAL reason behind the disappearing gloves is a highly organized world-wide plot to get me to embrace the idea of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. I’ve always said that I could never see the reasoning behind selling groceries and clothing in the same store (barring, of course, those rare but unfortunate instances when you really need to buy some toilet paper, Milk of Magnesia, and a new pair of pants right now), but, with our incredibly shrinking glove supply I am starting to see the advantages of making out a shopping list that reads: milk, eggs, bread, and gloves.
Sound too far-fetched? Maybe, but then again, I can remember when I thought the idea of comparing buying cheese puffs to a Nazi book burning was far-fetched, too.